Kepler's Music of the Spheres

Kepler refers to Pythagoras' music of the spheres in the 12th chapter of his Mysterium Cosmographicum. See (Koestler, 1960, p. 51). In Kepler's version, each planet plays a wailing sound, like a trombone. The pitch of each planet's trombone was to be proportional to the angular velocity of the planet.

In this site we develop all the basic concepts, and a strategy to print out a table of pitch data for each planet, based on the integration of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) equivalent to Kepler's Second Law.


Rev'd 20 jan 2002 by ralph abraham